"Usurer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... usurer's grasp released the forfeit land; The slanderer faltered at the witness-stand, And all men took ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... infected darkness. In this place Dwell many thousand thousand sundry sorts Of never-dying deaths; there damned souls Roar without pity, there are gluttons fed With toads and adders; there is burning oil Pour'd down the drunkard's throat, 'the usurer Is forced to sup whole draughts of molten gold'; There is the murderer for ever stabb'd, Yet can he never die; there lies the wanton On racks of burning steel, whilst in his soul He feels the torment ...
— Poems, 1799 • Robert Southey
... zealous Puritan," with whom he talked of his prospects. "I loved the maid, and desired to be rich," he tells us; but these Puritan people were horrified at his deliberately intending to live the life of a usurer, and they "threatened great judgments, and danger of ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... footsteps on the fast-whirling earth. But the family passions lived on in him under altered conditions: this descendant of the Bardi was not a man swift in street warfare, or one who loved to play the signor, fortifying strongholds and asserting the right to hang vassals, or a merchant and usurer of keen daring, who delighted in the generalship of wide commercial schemes: he was a man with a deep-veined hand cramped by much copying of manuscripts, who ate sparing dinners, and wore threadbare ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... carved marble of a monument, bellowed forth the news of the Dutch war, while another, not far from him, on a bench, announced in lugubrious accents the number of those who had died on the previous day of the pestilence. There, at the very font, was a usurer paying over a sum of money to a gallant—it was Sir Paul Parravicin—who was sealing a bond for thrice the amount of the loan. There, a party of choristers, attended by a troop of boys, were pursuing another gallant, who had ventured into the ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... had become purely a business one, like that between landlord and tenant. In her desire to indulge her boys she had unconsciously assumed a defensive and almost hostile attitude towards her husband. No debtor ever haggled with his usurer more doggedly than did Hester with her husband in behalf of her sons. The strategic contest had gone on so long that it had almost crowded out the memory of a closer relationship. This exchange of confidences to-night, when common recollections took them unawares ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... People live up to every cent of their incomes, and often beyond them. It is no uncommon occurrence for a fine mansion, its furniture, pictures, and even the jewels of its occupants, to be pledged to some usurer for the means with which to carry on this life of luxury. Each person strives to outdo his or her acquaintances. Those who have studied the matter find no slight cause for alarm in the rapid spread of extravagance among all classes of the city people, ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... all evils, to borrow money is perhaps the worst. If of a friend, he ceases to be one the moment you feel that you are bound to him by the heavy clog of obligation. If of a usurer, the interest, in this country, soon doubles the original sum, and you owe an increasing debt, which in time swallows up all ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... his life? But once I was five-and-twenty, like everybody else, and even then I had seen some queer things. I ought to begin at the beginning by telling you about some one whom it is impossible that you should have known. The man in question was a usurer. ...
— Gobseck • Honore de Balzac
... 1,000 florins besides. Debts contracted at play cannot remain unpaid for more than a couple of days. It was absolutely indispensable that I should procure these thousand florins somehow. I would not ask my husband for them and that was very foolish of me. I got the amount at last from a wretched usurer at an enormous rate of interest. When the amount plus interest became due again, I was still more afraid to tell my husband, and so kept on giving fresh bills, with the result that the amount of my indebtedness grew and grew as the years rolled on, ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... the sick yeoman whom thy fair daughter Rebecca redeemed from the gyves at York, and kept him in thy house till his health was restored, when thou didst dismiss him recovered, and with a piece of money?—Usurer as thou art, thou didst never place coin at better interest than that poor silver mark, for it has this day saved thee ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... another with his eyes not to be false and deceitful, a sailor and hangman to be pitiful, a poor man to build churches, a quack doctor to have a good conscience, a bailiff not to be a merciless villain, an hostess not to over-reckon you, and an usurer ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous
... to think of that garret, Will; thou art not so unconscionable to put me there? Why, 'tis a kind of little ease[B], to cramp thy rebellious prentices in; I have seen an usurer's iron chest would hold two on't: A penny looking-glass cannot stand upright in the window, that and the brush tills it: the hat-case must be disposed under the bed, and the comb-case will hang down, from the ceiling to the floor. ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... not always rattles, Remember, reader! you have had before The worst of tempests and the best of battles That e'er were brew'd from elements or gore, Besides the most sublime of—Heaven knows what else: An usurer could scarce expect much more— But my best canto, save one on astronomy, ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... Lablache, usurer, scoundrel, smiled benignly at his companion as he pronounced his concluding words. The Hon. Bunning-Ford looked, thought, and looked again. He began to think that Lablache was meditating a more rascally proceeding ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... little Max made out the way That Grootver pressed that poor harassed old man. His money he must have, too long delay Had turned the usurer to a ruffian. "But let me take my ship, with many bales Of cotton stuffs dyed crimson, green, and blue, Cunningly patterned, made to suit the taste Of mandarin's ladies; when my battered sails Open for home, such stores will ...
— Sword Blades and Poppy Seed • Amy Lowell
... much enslaved to earthly affairs all the week cannot disengage or break the chain of their thoughts so suddenly as to apply to a discourse that is wholly foreign to what they have most at heart. Tell a usurer of charity, and mercy, and restitution—you talk to the deaf; his heart and soul, with all his senses, are got among his bags, or he is gravely asleep and dreaming of a mortgage. Tell a man of business, that the cares of the world choke the good seed; that we must not encumber ...
— Three Sermons, Three Prayer • Jonathan Swift
... with a base, trading usurer?" he asked, still mocking me, though I thought that there ...
— The Virgin of the Sun • H. R. Haggard
... was surveyor of the roads; had been a kind of toad-eater to Sir Robert Walpole and Lord Godolphin; was a great frequenter of Newmarket, and a notorious usurer. His reputed wealth is stated, in the Gentleman's Magazine, at three hundred ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... Usurer, Old fat Guts he came grunting; The Devil left all care, For joy he fell a Jumping—To ...
— Wit and Mirth: or Pills to Purge Melancholy, Vol. 5 of 6 • Various
... in whose gay address and rattling conversation you could hardly recognise the sophistical defender of unauthorised invasion, and the subtle inventor of Holy Alliances and Imperial Leagues. Then came the rich usurer from Frankfort or the prosperous merchant from Hamburgh, who, with his wife and daughters, were seeking some recreation from his flourishing counting-house in the sylvan gaieties of a German bathing-place. Flirting with these was an adventurous dancing-master from Paris, ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... Britain, her ancient peers, must decide, if it is their will that a house, not the least noble of their members, shall be stripped of their possessions, the reward of the patriotism of generations, as the pawn of a wretched mechanic becomes forfeit to the usurer the instant the hour of redemption has passed away. If they yield to the grasping severity of the creditor, and to the gnawing usury that eats into our lands as moths into a raiment, it will be of more ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... Ratsei's Ghost (see p. 49), which, as Mr. Sidney Lee, in his "Life of William Shakespeare," p. 159, 1898 ed., confesses, refers to Shakespeare. Ratsei advises the young actor to copy Shakespeare, "and to feed upon all men, to let none feede upon thee" (meaning Shakespeare was a cruel usurer). As we shew, page 53, Grant White says: "The pursuit of an impoverished man for the sake of imprisoning him and depriving him both of the power of paying his debts and supporting himself and his family, is an incident in ...
— Bacon is Shake-Speare • Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence
... provoke laughter; but, before that, it had already alienated our sympathy: how can we put ourselves in tune with a soul which is not in tune with itself? In Moliere's L'Avare we have a scene bordering upon drama. It is the one in which the borrower and the usurer, who have never seen each other, meet face to face and find that they are son and father. Here we should be in the thick of a drama, if only greed and fatherly affection, conflicting with each other in the soul of Harpagon, had ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... window of the town. The news was working in every household, from the servants in the kitchens to the aged people helped to their food with bib and spoon, that the famed daughter of Daniel Custis was the prize of the junk dealer and usurer in "old town" by the bridge, who had enslaved a ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... you no failings?" Yes; Failings enough, but different, maybe less. One day when Maenius happened to attack Novius the usurer behind his back, "Do you not know yourself?" said one, "or think That if you play the stranger, we shall wink?" "Not know myself!" he answered, "you say true: I do not: so I take a stranger's due." Self-love like this is knavish and absurd, And well deserves ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... belonging to a fat Chinese usurer, Willy for very little money came into possession of a quantity of Japanese prints. These were the next things he showed Frederick. There were most of Hiroshige's views of Lake Biwa; there were the thirty-six views of Fujiyama by Hokusai. One of the ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... thought how easy it would be to buy up a part of Alphonse's liabilities and let them fall into the hands of a grasping usurer. But it would be a great injustice to suppose that Charles for a moment contemplated doing such a thing himself. It was only an idea he was fond of dwelling upon; he was, as it were, in ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland
... past, vague and dim, arising in the deserted chapel, the memory of those two ladies, the one all piety, the other all idealism, aristocratic and dreamy, drove Febrer to distraction. To think that soon the rude hands of the usurer would profane so much that was old and venerable! He could not stay to witness it! ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... rather to fill the audience with horror than pleasure and mirth; and if in the conclusion their plots should be baffled, even this would come too late to prevent that ill impression. But in the Lawsuit this is admirably avoided: for the character chosen is a rich, avaricious usurer: the pecuniary distresses of such a person can never be looked upon with horror; and if he should be even handled unjustly, we always wait ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... categories: those who had become impoverished by the revolution and the wars of the Empire, and those who had made their fortunes thereby. Among the former was M. le Marquis de Firmin-Latour, a handsome young officer of cavalry; and among the latter was one Mauruss Mosenstein, a usurer of the Jewish persuasion, whose wealth was reputed in millions, and who had a handsome daughter biblically named Rachel, who a year ago had become Madame la ...
— Castles in the Air • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... the widow and the orphan. Moreover, he had robbed Florent Guillaume of his scrivenry at the sign of Our Lady. He was used to lend at high interest on sound security. Yet could no man infer he was a usurer, forasmuch as he was a Christian, and it was only the Jews practised usury,—the Jews, and, if you will, the Lombards and ...
— The Merrie Tales Of Jacques Tournebroche - 1909 • Anatole France
... Benfield has thrown in the borough of Cricklade to reinforce the county representation. Not content with this, in order to station a steady phalanx for all future reforms, this public-spirited usurer, amidst his charitable toils for the relief of India, did not forget the poor, rotten Constitution of his native country. For her, he did not disdain to stoop to the trade of a wholesale upholsterer for this House,—to furnish it, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... earth, which unlocked the treasure houses of souls, and brought its own soul to each body. All came to life except one man, who, as God explained to the prophet, was excluded from the resurrection because he was a usurer. ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... obtained a decree, which, reviewing the accounts presented by Pierre, disallowed them, and condemned the dishonest guardian to pay his nephew four hundred livres for each year of his administration. The day on which this sum had to be disbursed from his strong box the old usurer vowed vengeance, but until he could gratify his hatred he was forced to conceal it, and to receive attempts at reconciliation with a friendly smile. It was not until six months later, on the occasion of a joyous ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - MARTIN GUERRE • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... in a troop to ensnare souls on earth. Lucifer left the minstrel in charge of the infernal regions, promising, if he let no souls escape, to treat him on the return with a fat monk roasted, or a usurer dressed with hot sauce. But while the fiends were away St. Peter came, in disguise, and allured the minstrel to play at dice, and to stake the souls which were in torture under his care. Peter won, and carried them off in triumph. The devils, coming back and finding the fires all out and ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... "You must know," said she, "that my husband's birthday approaches, and I wish to surprise him with a gift. It is therefore necessary that I raise some money without troubling him. How much—abominable usurer!—could you ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... bad match: a bankrupt, a prodigal, who dare scarce show his head on the Rialto; a beggar, that used to come so smug upon the mart.—Let him look to his bond: he was wont to call me usurer;—let him look to his bond: he was wont to lend money for a Christian courtesy;—let him look to ...
— The Merchant of Venice [liberally edited by Charles Kean] • William Shakespeare
... according to the needs of my body. Human beings and those creatures that spring from immobile objects have different enjoyments. In my former life I was a human being. O puissant one, I was a Sudra possessed of great wealth. I was not devoted to the Brahmanas. I was cruel, vile in conduct, and a usurer. I was harsh in speech. I regard cunning as wisdom. I hated all creatures. Taking advantage of pretexts in compacts made between myself and others. I was always given to taking away what belonged to others. Without feeding servants and guests arrived at my house, I used to ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... you can, the evil which a country usurer exercises, armed against them with such burdensome rights; it is the feudal seigniory in the hands of Harpagon, or rather of old Grandet. When, indeed, a tax becomes insupportable we see, by the local complaints, that it ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... the dwelling of old Isaac Nabal, known to his people as Isaac the Moneylender, but styled by the Romans Isaac the Usurer. He was enormously rich and loaned his gold at exorbitant rates to the extravagant and impecunious Roman nobles. Isaac was wifeless and childless, but so eager for gain was he that he kept his house constantly filled ...
— Monte-Cristo's Daughter • Edmund Flagg
... my back was turned—and away! As for stooping to coax him as Mowbray would, when he had a point to gain, I could not have done it. To ask Jacob to lend me money, to beg him to give me more time to pay a debt, to cajole and bully him by turns, to call him alternately usurer and my honest fellow, extortioner and my friend Jacob—my tongue could not have uttered the words, my soul detested the thought; yet all this, and more, could ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... like these the clutch of the usurer was relaxed and the general well-being promoted, measures were taken to crown the work by a stable system of finance. It will be recalled that two years before the Emperor had saved the public credit ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... the rest I'm forced to subscribe to myself, for I can lay it to no Body else." I shall only remark on this, that nearly the whole play is a mere paraphrasing of Moliere's Cocu Imaginaire, and several other of his plays. The scene between Leonora, the heroine, and Sterling, the old usurer and lover (Act I.), is imitated from Madelon's description in the art of making love in the Pretentious Young Ladies, and so are many others. The servant Crispin is a medley of Mascarille from The Blunderer, of Gros-Rene from The Love-Tiff, and ...
— Sganarelle - or The Self-Deceived Husband • Moliere
... [usurer's chain] I know not whether the chain was, in our authour's time, the common ornament of wealthy citizens, or whether he satirically uses usurer and alderman as ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... necessaries of life. But, in consideration of the outlay the Stopfer couple expected to make, they bargained for three months' residence and a month's payment in advance. Rub a Swiss ever so little, and you find the usurer. After breakfast, Rodolphe at once made himself at home by depositing in his room such property as he had brought with him for the journey to the Saint-Gothard, and he watched Leopold as he set out, moved by the spirit of routine, to carry out the excursion for himself ...
— Albert Savarus • Honore de Balzac
... said. "What is the use of giving love? Love should be lent. Love is an usurer that asks high interest. Nay, not the interest only, but the capital and the interest to boot. Oh, Star! what happens to the man who is so mad as to ...
— Morning Star • H. Rider Haggard
... friend. Once upon a time, I was deprived of my money and in a disagreeable manner. When I wrote you a courteous letter, asking how much time you needed, you saw fit to answer with an uncourteous note—and treated me as if I were a usurer, a plunderer of widows and children—altho' I was really the one plundered, and you belonged to the plunderer's party. But as I was more judicious, I contented myself with answering your note courteously, but ...
— Plays: Comrades; Facing Death; Pariah; Easter • August Strindberg
... You shall have a hundred thousand, this very day. Ptitsin, get the money, you gay usurer! Take what you like for it, but get it by the evening! I'll show that I'm in earnest!" cried Rogojin, working himself up into a frenzy ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... them in him, and to him in them. Antonio has scorned his religion, balked him of usurious gains, insulted his person: therefore he hates him as a Christian, himself a Jew; hates him as a lender of money gratis, himself a griping usurer; hates him as Antonio, himself Shylock. Moreover, who but a Christian, one of Antonio's faith and fellowship, has stolen away his daughter's heart, and drawn her into revolt, loaded with his ducats and his precious, precious jewels? Thus his religion, ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... those proprietors in whom there is a foregone and profound horror of repairs and decoration, one of the men who regard their position as Paris house-owners as a business. In the vast chain of moral species, these people hold a middle place between the miser and the usurer. Optimists in their own interests, they are all faithful to the Austrian status quo. If you speak of moving a cupboard or a door, of opening the most indispensable air-hole, their eyes flash, their bile rises, they rear like a frightened horse. When the wind blows down a few chimney-pots they are ...
— The Purse • Honore de Balzac
... wisest and the most moral of men, Cicero treated as an usurer, and the pedant Athenaeus as illiterate; the latter points out as a Socratic folly our philosopher disserting on the nature of justice before his judges, who were so many thieves. The malignant buffoonery of Aristophanes treats him much worse; but he, as Jortin says, was a great wit, but ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... mind; I do not know whether it is unconscious observation or fiendish irony. But it is this. In Our Mutual Friend is an old patriarch named Aaron, who is a saintly Jew made to do the dirty work of an abominable Christian usurer. In an artistic sense I think the patriarch Aaron as much of a humbug as the patriarch Casby. In a moral sense there is no doubt at all that Dickens introduced the Jew with a philanthropic idea of doing justice to Judaism, which he was told he had affronted by the great gargoyle of Fagin. If ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... occidere. What saie you to be a murderer? Soche a thyng saieth he, is [Fol. xxxvij.v] Usurie. A brief sentence againste Usurers, but wittely pro- nounced from the mouth of a godlie, sage, noble, and descrite persone, whiche sentence let the Usurer, ioigne to his Usury retourned, and repeate at the retourne thereof, this sentence [Sidenote: The sentence of Cato a dis- comfort to v- surers.] of Cato, I haue murthered. This one sentence will discou- ...
— A booke called the Foundacion of Rhetorike • Richard Rainolde
... had been exhausted by the delays of the court. He received a hint from some of the hangers-on of the Chancellor that a present of one hundred pounds would expedite matters. The poor man had not the sum required. However, having found out an usurer who accommodated him with it at high interest, he carried it to York House. The Chancellor took the money, and his dependants assured the suitor that all would go right. Aubrey was, however, disappointed; for, after considerable delay, "a ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... money-lenders. In consequence of this, there has settled amongst them a particular class of usurers, who supply petty sums on satisfactory pledges, and at enormous interest. These pawnbrokers on a small scale are generally far more pitiless than the aristocratic usurer, whose customers drive to his door in their carriages. Compunction, humanity, a feeling of pity for the unfortunates upon whose need they fatten, never by any chance enter their breast. Amongst these callous extortioners there was one ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... disdainful laugh, Had quaffed the cup of pleasure to its dregs, And now, grown old, must pay the penalty In wrinkles and uncourted loneliness; The widow, who, but newly desolate, Would grasp a hand, then start to find it gone; The spendthrift and the sordid usurer, Who knew no sentiment save lust for gold; The bloated drunkard, sinking 'neath the weight Of wassail inclination dissolute; The youth, who, following his baleful steps, Reeled for the first time from intemperance; And she who had ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... outlandish way, So fine too, that they their own shadows woo, While he walks in the sad and pilgrim shoe; I'm mad at Fate, and angry ev'n to sin, To see deserts and learning clad so thin; To think how th' earthly usurer can brood Upon his bags, and weigh the precious food With palsied hands, as if his soul did fear The scales could rob him of what he laid there. Like devils that on hid treasures sit, or those Whose jealous eyes trust not beyond their nose, ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan
... character of protector of the Jews, and Samuel Pfefferkorn, a Hebrew usurer, had just left the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... situation as usher in a Yorkshire school kept by one Squeers. But the young fellow's gorge rises at the sickening cruelty exercised in the school, and he leaves it, having first beaten Mr. Squeers,—leaves it followed by a poor shattered creature called Smike. Meanwhile Ralph, the usurer, befriends his sister-in-law and niece after his own fashion, and tries to use the latter's beauty in furtherance of his trade as a money-lender. Nicholas discovers his plots, frustrates all his schemes, rescues, and ultimately marries, a ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... The usurer commented under his breath with remarks that were not scriptured. He threw away his cigar and went to a case where he kept some law books which contained the statutes that were concerned with money ...
— When Egypt Went Broke • Holman Day
... a fat, flabby, middle-aged man whose nose would have roused the provisional hostility of those who have convinced themselves that Jews are not as other men. His nose did not definitely brand him as a usurer and a murderer of Christ, but it was suspicious. His clothes hung loose, and might have been anybody's clothes. He advanced with brisk assurance to the table, bowed, somewhat too effusively, to several people, and sat down next to Peel- Swynnerton. ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... of relief and significance went round the circle. The fame of Eli or "Skinner" Hemmings, as a notorious miser and usurer, had passed ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... the profession of the liberal arts: but every other branch of commercial industry was affected by the severity of the law. The honorable merchant of Alexandria, who imported the gems and spices of India for the use of the western world; the usurer, who derived from the interest of money a silent and ignominious profit; the ingenious manufacturer, the diligent mechanic, and even the most obscure retailer of a sequestered village, were obliged to admit the officers of the revenue into the partnership of their gain; and ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... instructor's step, so that your art Deserves the name of second in descent From God. These two, if thou recall to mind Creation's holy book, from the beginning Were the right source of life and excellence To human kind. But in another path The usurer walks; and Nature in herself And in her follower thus he sets at nought, Placing elsewhere his hope. But follow now My steps on forward journey bent; for now The Pisces play with undulating glance Along the' horizon, and the ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... his relation to the capitalist, whether it be a member of the landed gentry or a wealthy peasant, known as a Kulak, or a Jew who lends money at interest, or an Armenian or, for that matter, a usurer of the Orthodox faith. In order that the land be retained by the peasant it is far more essential that only members of the peasant class be allowed to attend the auction sales of land sold because of the owner's arrears. And yet our ...
— The Shield • Various
... famine where abundance lies; he tells him that he beguiles the world, unblesses some mother; that he is his mother's glass and calls back the April of her prime; asks him why he abuses the bounteous largess given him to give; calls him a profitless usurer; tells him that the hours that have made him fair will unfair him; that he should not let winter's rugged hand deface ere he has begotten a child, though it were a greater happiness should he beget ten. He asks if his failure to marry is because he ...
— Testimony of the Sonnets as to the Authorship of the Shakespearean Plays and Poems • Jesse Johnson
... true when one considers nowadays the delicate and important functions of the world of banking and finance. The old-fashioned money-changer and the usurer of earlier periods were regarded as the very antithesis of men engaged in honorable mercantile life, and especially of those who possess a social spirit and the desire to be useful members of the community. But in these days the banks are not merely private money-making ...
— The business career in its public relations • Albert Shaw
... he adopted the equally dangerous course of hoarding up all his savings, until it became a passion with him. After a while he retired from business, but the passion clung to him with all the tenacity of a long established habit, and he became a usurer. He was known to all the young profligates, the bad young men who throng our city, and became as necessary to them as the poor avaricious Jew was in former days to the spendthrifts and gamesters in London. He told me frightful stories, my children, of tyranny and fraud, of ruined young ...
— Effie Maurice - Or What do I Love Best • Fanny Forester
... is again marked by miracles. Rich men vied with each other in making funeral offerings. One gave him a magnificent stone coffin, but this man had been a usurer. Usury was a sin abhorred by Saint Bernard, and the people found that no force or persuasion could place his body within this coffin. So another tomb, less pretentious, but more worthy, was found. At the end Bernard's remains ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... "how many sonnets would you give for me? If you were a usurer in gold instead of in rhyme, I would ask how many dollars. But it is unjust to pay in a coin that we value little. To a man starving in gold mines, a piece of bread weighs more than all the treasures of the earth. To you, I warrant your poems are the standard of appreciation. How ...
— The House of the Vampire • George Sylvester Viereck
... visited by one of those worthies known among the Romans by the appellation of haeredipetae, who had amassed a large for-tune by a close attention to the immediate wants and weakness of raw, inexperienced heirs. This honourable usurer had sold an annuity upon the life of a young spendthrift, being thereto induced by the affirmation of his physician, who had assured him his patient's constitution was so rotten, that he could not live one year to an end. He had, nevertheless, made shift to weather ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... in Germany, as now constituted. Other walks of emolument are still more despised. Alfieri, a continental "noble," that is, a born gentleman, speaks of bankers as we in England should of a Jewish usurer, or tricking money-changer. The liberal trades, such as those which minister to literature or the fine arts, which, with us, confer the station of gentleman upon those who exercise them, are, in the estimate of a continental "noble," fitted to assign a certain ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... a very few dollars as a maximum, was probably the extent of Sonnino's ventures along this line. Sonnino himself was a crafty little man, but craftiness, if it did not transgress the law, was not a crime; he was undoubtedly a usurer in his petty way, and he was both feared and disliked, but beyond that no one pretended to know anything about him. Ordinarily, Sonnino's safe, then, might be expected to be rather a barren affair, hardly a lure for a Gentleman ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... at present spread over Europe would be disastrously torn by any considerable war; and that in consequence it is to the interest of the usurers to preserve peace. But here, it seems to me, we must make a clear differentiation. It may easily be to the interest of a particular usurer, or group of usurers, to provoke war; that very financial crisis which Mr. Angell anticipates may quite probably be a source of profit to them. That it would not be to the interest of a nation of usurers to fight is very probable. ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... instant forgot it, but she took little thought about her divine rights, if she had any,—and in fact Saint Bernard preferred her without them,—while she was scandalized at the greed of officials in her Son's Court. One day a rich usurer and a very poor old woman happened to be dying in the same town. Gaultier de Coincy did not say, as an accurate historian should, that he was present, nor did he mention names or dates, although it ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... decided to appeal to Glady he had hesitated between him and a usurer named Caffie, whom he did not know personally, but whom he had heard spoken of as a rascal who was interested in all sorts of affairs, preferring the bad to the good—of successions, marriages, interdictions, extortions; ...
— Conscience, Complete • Hector Malot
... disturbed in their work of Jew-baiting by the outcry of the civilized world gave full vent to their hatred in their conversations with Baron Hirsch's deputy. White reported afterwards that the functionaries of St. Petersburg had painted to him the Russian Jew as "a compound of thief and usurer." Pobyedonostzev delivered himself of the following malicious observation: "The Jew is a parasite. Remove him from the living organism in which and and on which he exists and put this parasite on a rock—and he will die." While thus justifying before the distinguished foreigner ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... contemptuously. A feeling of noble pride awoke within him for an instant, and he coldly withdrew his arm from the banker's hand. "You are only a usurer, ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... mestizo, Andre Certa, became enamored of the beautiful Jewess. What would have appeared inexplicable to the public, was the hundred thousand piasters, the price of her hand; but this bargain was secret. And besides, Samuel trafficked in sentiments as in native productions. A banker, usurer, merchant, ship-owner, he had the talent to do business with everybody. The schooner Annonciation, which was hovering about the mouth of the Rimac, belonged ...
— The Pearl of Lima - A Story of True Love • Jules Verne
... nobles vying with one another in baseness; and the four jesters whom the contemptuous neglect of history permitted me to invent; and Cromwell's family, each member of which is as a thorn in his flesh; and Thurloe, the Protector's Achates; and the Jewish rabbi, Israel Ben-Manasseh, spy, usurer, and astrologer, vile on two sides, sublime on the third; and Rochester, the unique Rochester, absurd and clever, refined and crapulous, always cursing, always in love, and always tipsy, as he himself boasted to Bishop Burnet—wretched poet and gallant gentleman, vicious and ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... your position plain to you. Your wife has refused me her endorsement. May that one word unseal your eyes! But, if that does not suffice, learn that your notes have been protested at the instigation of a Sieur Lecuyer, formerly head-clerk to Maitre Solonet, a notary in Bordeaux. That usurer in embryo (who came from Gascony for jobbery) is the proxy of your very honorable mother-in-law, who is the actual holder of your notes for one hundred thousand francs, on which I am told that worthy woman doled out to you only ...
— The Marriage Contract • Honore de Balzac
... the enthusiastic usurer had said his say and had his audience, and was straightway pushed on one side. Then my usurer, not knowing me, though indeed I knew him, or not liking the looks of me, as indeed his looks were distasteful to me, for I think ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... your fellow passengers; now for mine. There came down with me Blepsias, the Pisatan usurer, Lampis, an Acarnanian freelance, and the Corinthian millionaire Damis. The last had been poisoned by his son, Lampis had cut his throat for love of the courtesan Myrtium, and the wretched Blepsias is supposed to have died ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... exclaimed Mr. Watchorn, returning his horn to its case, and eyeing Mr. Sponge and Miss Glitters sailing away with the again breast-high-scent pack. 'Oh, you exorbitant usurer!' continued he, gathering his horse to skate after them. 'Well now, that's the most disgraceful proceedin' I ever saw in the whole course of my life. Hang me, if I'll stand such work! Dash me, but I'll 'quaint the Queen!—I'll tell Sir George Grey! ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... before, since the hoods had gone out of fashion. The same woman had taken a contract to supply a large firm with wrappers, and employed many in the neighborhood, paying them the smallest possible prices. This woman was a usurer on a scale so pitiful and petty that it almost condoned usury. Sometimes a man on discovering the miserable pittance for which his wife toiled during every minute which she could snatch from her household duties and the care of her children, would inveigh against it. "That woman is cheating ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... not some old usurer be drunk overnight with a bag of money, and leave it behind him on a stall? For God's sake, Syn, let's rise to-morrow by break of day, and see. I protest, la, if I had as much money as an alderman, I would ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... last becomes lower than a chorus girl, for she prostitutes herself to her husband. In her sweetest kisses there is money; in all her words there is money. In playing this part her heart becomes like lead towards you. The most polished, the most treacherous usurer never weighs so completely with a single glance the future value in bullion of a son of a family who may sign a note to him, than your wife appraises one of your desires as she leaps from branch to branch like an escaping ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... loan had been made was within two days of its expiration, when, half beside himself with perplexity, Mr. Tompkins advertised his property for sale. There were enough who understood its real value precisely, and were ready to come forward and offer to purchase. As soon as the miser and usurer saw the course events were taking, he very kindly informed Mr. Tompkins that he had just received, unexpectedly, a large sum of money, and should not want the ten ...
— Finger Posts on the Way of Life • T. S. Arthur
... illuminating instance of a business interest subjected first to excommunication—literally—and then to outlawry, is that of the usurer, or, in modern parlance, the loan shark. To the mediaeval mind there was something distinctly immoral in an income from property devoted to the furnishing of personal loans. We need not stop to defend the mediaeval position or to attack it; all that concerns us here is that an opportunity for ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... the paper had an existence of little more than a year. In the course of its brief career, however, Willis paid a flying visit to England, where he accomplished a great deal of literary business. He had written a play called The Usurer Matched, which was brought out by Wallack at the Surrey Theatre, and is said to have been played to crowded houses during a fairly long run, but neither this nor any of his other plays brought the author fame or fortune. During this season he published his Loiterings of Travel, ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... Venice. He was a usurer who had amassed an immense fortune by lending money at great interest to Christian merchants. Shylock, being a hard-hearted man, exacted the payment of the money he lent with such severity that he was much disliked ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... countries. Plato objects to usury because it tends to set one class, the poor or the borrowers, against another, the rich or the lenders; and goes so far as to make it wrong for the borrower to repay either the principal or interest of his debt. He further considers that the profession of the usurer is to be despised, as it is an illiberal and debasing way of making money.[1] While Plato therefore disapproves in no ambiguous words of usury, he does not develop the philosophical bases of his objection, but is content to condemn it rather for its probable ...
— An Essay on Mediaeval Economic Teaching • George O'Brien
... no money at all. Children, I have some. One may live without money in Hindostan, but in England even the Philosopher cannot meditate unless he can pay for food and shelter. I have money, Iris, and I have paid the usurer enough to satisfy him. Let ...
— In Luck at Last • Walter Besant
... dost thou spend Upon thy self thy beauty's legacy? Nature's bequest gives nothing, but doth lend, And being frank she lends to those are free: Then, beauteous niggard, why dost thou abuse The bounteous largess given thee to give? Profitless usurer, why dost thou use So great a sum of sums, yet canst not live? For having traffic with thy self alone, Thou of thy self thy sweet self dost deceive: Then how when nature calls thee to be gone, What acceptable audit canst thou leave? Thy unused beauty must ...
— Shakespeare's Sonnets • William Shakespeare
... in the night, and the beauty of mystery is everywhere; but still the plain truth remains, that mouth and purse must be filled. If, hitherto, you have supposed me a visionary, be undeceived. I am no one-ideaed one, either; no more than the seers before me. Was not Seneca a usurer? Bacon a courtier? and Swedenborg, though with one eye on the invisible, did he not keep the other on the main chance? Along with whatever else it may be given me to be, I am a man of serviceable knowledge, and a man of the world. Know me for such. And as for my disciple here," turning towards ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... our glasses again and again with its silvery foam. The surgeon was easily managed; but at the second glass which I offered to my neighbor the lawyer, he told me with the frigid politeness of a usurer that he ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... are a man of merit, and want money; you will starve on your merit; you can only get money from me. Come, my friend, how much is it? I ask the easiest interest in the world: old Mordecai, the usurer, has made you pay twice as heavily before now: nothing but the signature of a bond, which is a mere ceremony, and the transfer of an article which, in itself, is a supposition—a valueless, windy, uncertain property ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Antonio more than he valued money, and this hatred, though it may have its root in love of money, half redeems him in our eyes. Shakespeare could not imagine a man who loved money more than anything else; his hated and hateful usurer is more a man of passion than ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... guise of an usurious money-lender. It would be hard in the history of usury to come across the well-ascertained details of a more grasping, griping usurer. His practice had been of the kind which we may have been accustomed to hear rebuked with the scathing indignation of our just judges. But yet Brutus was accounted one of the noblest Romans of the day, only second, if second, to Cato ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... circumstances, the mine peon often has a deep-rooted hatred of the American, which vents itself chiefly in cold silence, unless opportunity makes some more effective way possible. Next on his black-list comes the Spaniard, who is reputed a heartless usurer who long enjoyed protection under Diaz. Third, perhaps, come the priests, though these are endured as a necessary evil, as we endure a bad government. The padre of Calderon drifted up to the mine one day to pay his respects and drink the mine health in good Scotch whisky. Gradually he ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... given to love than to charity or churchgoing, the fidalgo de ra[c,]a, the haughty fidalgo de solar with a page to carry his chair, the judge who through his wife accepts bribes from the Jews, the rhetorical goldsmith, the usurer (onzeneiro) with his heart in his cassette (arca)[127]. There too the pert servant-girl, the gossiping maidservant, the witch busy at night over a hanged man at the cross-roads, the faithless wife of the India-bound lisboeta, the Lisbon old woman copious in malediction, her ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... money-lender. Usury was not a less contemptible vocation in the seventeenth century than it is at the present time; and most young barristers of gentle descent and fair prospects would have preferred any lot to the degradation of marriage with the child of the most fortunate usurer in Charles II.'s London. But the Hon. Francis North was placed comfortably beneath the prejudices of his order and time of life. He was of noble birth, but quite ready to marry into a plebeian family; he was young, but loved money more than aught else. So his hearing was quickened and his ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... was in the hands of a money shark, for even little villages boast their loan offices, where some usurer expects to get ten per cent. on his money, and will not hesitate to foreclose ...
— Darry the Life Saver - The Heroes of the Coast • Frank V. Webster
... presentation to benefices, descended on the unhappy priesthood. The wholesale pillage kindled a wide spirit of resistance. Oxford gave the signal by hunting a Papal legate out of the city amid cries of "usurer" and "simoniac" from the mob of students. Fulk Fitz-Warenne in the name of the barons bade a Papal collector begone out of England. "If you tarry here three days longer," he added, "you and your ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... rest is usury. Think! To give fifty, and ask three hundred and fifty, is the part of an usurer." ...
— In Luck at Last • Walter Besant
... yourself a usurer in your dreams, foretells that you will be treated with coldness by your associates, and your business will decline ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... there arose, as it were, a new era of liberty to the Roman commons; in this that a stop was put to the practice of confining debtors. This alteration of the law was effected in consequence of the lust and signal cruelty of one usurer. His name was Lucius Papirius. To him one Caius Publilius having surrendered his person to be confined for a debt due by his father, his youth and beauty, which ought to have excited commiseration, operated on the other's mind as incentives to lust and insult. He first attempted to seduce the young ...
— The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius
... his boat and in a rage commanded the boatman to pursue the insolent servant of the usurer. But he of the sheepskin wig threw down the cane, took an oar himself, and his men helped him so well that pursuit ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... out, called it a lark? Do you think a great fortune will all of a sudden change such a chap as that into an honest man? No, what's ill got is ill spent, and old Giffrey Jenkins's money 'ill never turn to good account. He that grinds the poor, and goes against scripture as a usurer, 'ill never find his son do well. Howel shall never have my consent to marry Netta, and ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... follows that this and other issues of German paper will filter right through the Empire. At the same time a German expert, Dr. Kautz, was appointed to start banks throughout Turkey in order to free the peasants from the Turkish village usurer, and in consequence enslave them to the German banks. Similarly a German was put at the head of the Ottoman Agricultural Bank. These new branches worked very well, but it is pleasant to think that one such was started by the Deutsche Bank at ...
— Crescent and Iron Cross • E. F. Benson
... tuft-hunter—this dandy capitalist—this money-lender, whose whole fortune had been wrung from the wants and follies of an aristocracy, was naturally a firm supporter of things as they are—how could things be better for men like Baron Levy? But the usurer's burst of democratic spleen did not surprise his precocious and acute faculty of observation. He had before remarked, that it is the persons who fawn most upon an aristocracy, and profit the most by the fawning, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... great space of time that has passed since he flourished, yet his character can be very clearly deduced from the many literary fragments he has left, and that is found to be the character of a pusillanimous and ill-bred usurer, wholly lacking in foresight, in generous enterprise, and chivalrous enthusiasm—in matters of the Faith a prig or a doubter, in matters of adventure a poltroon, in matters of Science an ignorant Parrot, and in Letters a wretchedly bad rhymester, ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc |
